Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry (2020) Review
Summary: The work of 23 different poets is interpreted by comic artist Julian Peters with each poem in a unique visual style.
4
Poetry and comics together at last
The work of 23 different poets is interpreted by comic artist Julian Peters with each of the poems being first presented in visual form and then listed in full afterwards.
It is an interesting concept, but I would recommend reading the poem first and then going back to read the interpretation of it as you will get more out of the work when you know how it goes. Some of the pieces are a bit hard to follow such as the Maya Angelou one and I had trouble reading the text of the Ezra Pound one at all.
If you like variety in your artwork then this is the book for you as every poem is presented in a different style that the artist chose to match the poem as they interpreted it. I agree with the artist in each of their choices and they do match the tone of the original poems.
Maybe not the best book to read in one sitting as the changes in style and tone can be a bit much to take in all at once. This would be a good one to read a bit at a time and come back to when you feel like it.
I had not heard of this comic artist beforehand, but will be looking out for his work in the future if it is up to this standard.
Is hard to pick just one poem that I liked the most in this format, my favourites in the book were: may my heart be always open, by e. e. cummings, Juke Box Love Song, by Langston Hughes, Buffalo Dusk, by Carl Sandburg, Because I Could Not Stop for Death, by Emily Dickinson and Conscientious Objector, by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
This would be an ideal if you are just getting into poetry and do not know much about which authors to look for. I recognised some of the names from literature and you can look up more of their work after you read this book.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants something a bit more substantial than the usual comic book stories and to show that comics can be educational.
Comic details:
Artist: Julian Peters
Includes poems by Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Christina Rossetti, William Wordsworth, William Ernest Henley, Robert Hayden, Edgar Allan Poe, W. H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Philip Johnson, W. B. Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Tess Gallagher, Ezra Pound, and Siegfried Sassoon.
Publisher: Plough Publishing
Release Date: April 2020
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